Once merely messianic, Blair is now
unhinged

Michael
Portillo

Identity cards will not make us safer.
That is the view of Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5,
speaking in Birmingham last week. That opinion must have earned her the
prime minister’s contempt. He likes to cite support from the security
services or top policemen each time he devises a proposal to limit our
historic liberties.

The sniffy response from No 10 was that Rimington was a private
individual who was entitled to her opinion. It was a stupid way to
describe one who had spent her career defeating terrorism. Her
intervention further weakened the government’s flimsy case. Its ID cards
bill got a further mauling in the Lords.

The more pigheadedly the prime
minister persists with the legislation the less we trust him. Britain
faces substantial dangers from terror. It would be good if we could have
faith in our national political leader. He assures us that drastic
measures are needed to protect us. But he has lost our confidence.

Blair’s problem is not that people have a distrust of slippery
politicians, nor merely that they are fed up with his government’s spin
and sleaze. The difficulty is rather that the prime minister has shown
that we should rely on him least on what matters most: national security.

When he devised the dodgy dossier on Iraq and led us to believe that
Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, he
sacrificed credibility. He has been damaged further by the claim from Sir
Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, that he
could have secured a delay to the American plan for war against Iraq. The
search for WMD could have gone on for longer. The charge has come at a bad
moment for No 10.

The prime minister’s loss of the public’s trust is scarcely new.
However, in recent weeks his judgment has deserted him too. Much of what
he now does and says appears irrational. Why, for example, does a man
almost obsessed with defeating the yob culture press on with deregulating
pub hours as though his life depended on it? It was laughably inconsistent
for the government last week to give the police new powers to tackle
public drunkenness on the same day that it forced 24-hour drinking through
the Commons.

Normally politicians are accused of doing anything to get elected. But
more puzzlingly when leaders have been around too long (both Margaret
Thatcher and Blair are examples) they press on stubbornly with laws that
can do them only harm. The pubs legislation has few backers. It cannot
possibly win Labour votes. There is not even any sign that Blair is
personally interested in it. The bill survives solely because of
government hubris. Ministers dare not rethink it because the
administration would lose face.

A still more vivid example of Blair’s self-destructive tendency was his
insistence that the police should be allowed to hold terror suspects for
90 days without charge. That led to the government’s massive defeat in the
Commons. He had utterly failed to convince. His case that only 90 days
would do was an assertion rather than an argument.

The prime minister’s job is to weigh, not merely swallow, the advice
that he receives. It is hardly surprising that some police officers asked
for 90 days. They may have calculated that Blair would halve their bid and
that parliament would quarter it. They were probably as dismayed as the
rest of us that Blair took their proposal at face value and tried to push
it through.

Charles Clarke, the home secretary, is as fully briefed on the
terrorist threat as Blair is. Yet he had repeatedly indicated that
compromise on a shorter period of detention would be acceptable. Clarke
has often been the victim of negative briefing from No 10. At a time like
this you need to keep your friends. After the catastrophic vote, Blair
made public remarks that seemed to blame the party’s whips. That too is
foolish. He might remember that the whips’ abandonment of Thatcher was one
factor in her downfall.

While the prime minister’s own party was setting limits to his
authoritarianism, Republican senators were reining back their president.
The upper house passed John McCain’s amendment to a defence bill, which
bans Americans from subjecting prisoners to cruel, inhumane or degrading
treatment. The senator has special moral authority since he was tortured
during his five years as a prisoner of the Vietcong. President Bush has
said he will veto the bill if the amendment is not reversed.

Could our terrorist enemies ever have imagined how easily America and
Britain would abandon their moral high ground? Both Bush and Blair are
zealots: men with a mission. They think that to appear tough they must
take dramatic, exceptional measures. They believe that they face a unique
threat, which is absurd when you consider what massive evils our countries
fought and overcame during the 20th century. They would inspire more
confidence if they displayed a greater sense of perspective and accorded
proper value to our inherited liberties. The prime minister has lost his
sense of proportion. He may even think proportionality has no place in the
fight against terror. He is wrong.

For 30 years Britain was attacked by Irish terrorists. Three thousand
people died. Pubs were blown up. A member of the royal family was
murdered. An attempt was made to assassinate the prime minister and the
cabinet in a Brighton hotel. A mortar bomb was fired at Downing Street.
The government of the day responded in general with modest exceptions to
our traditional liberties, which Blair voted against. When the government
occasionally went too far in its emergency measures — as with internment
without trial in Northern Ireland — it was obliged to backtrack.

Of course Al-Qaeda might do worse things than the IRA did. But even so
our response has to be proportionate. That applies equally to the
liberties that we are asked to surrender and to the economic costs that we
are forced to bear.

That is how the case for identity cards should be measured. The
argument that they could improve our security is weak, as Rimington
highlighted. They could be obtained with forged documents, and foreign
visitors will not need them. It is most unlikely that terrorists will
identify themselves with genuine identity cards when buying a mobile phone
(as the Madrid bombers did) unless they are suicide bombers who will not
care if they do.

But suppose for a moment that
identity cards could be proved to make us somewhat safer. Would that be
worth £30 billion, which is the revised estimate of the cost judged by the
London School of Economics? If we were going to spend £30 billion on
improving our security could we not deploy it better on something other
than identity cards, which are clearly as watertight as a colander?

Suppose, on the other hand, that the best argument for identity cards
is that they would cut benefit fraud. Is there any prospect that we could
save on misappropriated payments more than we had spent on introducing the
cards? Last week the government disputed the LSE cost estimate but could
offer no calculation of its own, and could claim only that savings on
fraud might be a few hundred million.

It is a recognised paradox
that government appraises huge items of expenditure less carefully than
small ones. But there are signs that the chancellor of the exchequer gets
the point. Under a Brown premiership the numbers, more than a concern for
civil liberties, will kill the legislation. Cost/benefit analysis has
never been Blair’s strong suit. The problem now is worse than that. He
fails absolutely to think his policies through.

I fear that the prime minister has become unhinged. He has always
tended towards being messianic. Now he is more convinced than ever that he
is right and everyone else wrong. Neither the views of parliament nor the
home secretary count for anything. He courts unpopularity, outrages his
supporters and has lost his instinct for survival. Logic plays little part
in his calculations and economics none.

As recently as last summer I, like many others, believed that Blair was
the man to lead Britain in a crisis. The alternative was Gordon Brown,
once famously described by a Blair aide as “psychologically flawed”. While
I do not dispute that description of the chancellor, the prime minister’s
psychiatric advantage over his rival is clearly narrowing.